Shadow Warrior

by Randall B. Woods

  Diem and Nhu’s attitude toward the growing American presence in Vietnam was, not surprisingly, ambivalent. They needed US guns and money; they were not sure they needed American advice, but that seemed to come with the territory. The Ngo brothers were authentic nationalists fully aware that their own positions depended on their ability to ensure that the Americans remained in a subordinate position. To this end, Diem pursued the divide-and-conquer approach that the Chinese and French had used so effectively against Vietnam. The brothers dealt with Ambassador Durbrow and General Williams formally, while behind the scenes they nurtured ties with as many American bureaucracies and nongovernmental organizations as possible, seeking their guidance and playing up to their host organizations back in Washington. At the same time, Diem maintained contact with Francis Cardinal Spellman, Senator Mike Mansfield, the Kennedy brothers, and other powerful individuals who had befriended him during his stay in the United States. “Diem’s style,” Colby observed, “was that of the traditional mandarin, assuming the legitimacy of his position to be beyond challenge and manipulating the currents of the distant imperial court (now in Washington) to ensure the continued support necessary to his mission.”18 Because Diem and Nhu perceived the CIA to be above both politics and the law in the United States, and because they knew the Agency had probably penetrated every faction, sect, and secret society in Vietnam, the Ngo brothers singled it out for special attention.

  During the summer of Colby’s first year in Vietnam, 1959, Chief of Station Natsios returned to the United States for his annual leave. In his absence the deputy chief of station began a series of weekly meetings with Ngo Dinh Nhu that would continue for nearly three years. To many Vietnamese and French, Nhu was Vietnam’s Rasputin. From 1954, the year of Diem’s return, until his fall in 1963, Nhu held the position of counselor to the president, but he was clearly the second most powerful figure in South Vietnam—some said the most powerful. He personally controlled not only the Can Lao (the government’s party apparatus), but also the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) Special Forces, which existed not to combat a communist insurgency directly but to act as a palace guard and supply political muscle for the House of Ngo. Nhu was as corrupt as Diem was uncorrupt. A lifelong opium user, the counselor to the president used his connections with international drug-smuggling rings to enrich himself and his extended family.

  Colby knew all of this, but it was his duty, as he perceived it, to take what was available and do the best he could with it. Just before leaving for his vacation, Natsios had escorted his second to Independence Palace to meet Nhu. They entered through the back gate, turned left to the West Wing, and went upstairs to the small office inhabited by the presidential counselor. Following a short wait, Nhu entered. “He was . . . thinner than his brother, delicately handsome, informally clad in a white sport shirt, and very soft-spoken, giving the impression of being extremely shy,” Colby recalled of that first encounter.19 The meeting, conducted in French, stretched over some four hours and covered a variety of subjects. At this and subsequent conferences, Colby quickly learned that the Ngo brothers did business in a most un-Western way. The American came prepared with a list of topics, talking points, and options. Nhu would listen quietly and then break in, discoursing at length on a subject of interest to him—the travails of the House of Ngo before Dien Bien Phu, the evils committed by the French-trained bureaucracy that still remained in place, the machinations of the French themselves, the irrelevancy of the noncommunist political critics of the government, and the relevancy of Mounier’s philosophy of personalism, not only to Catholics but to all Vietnamese. Nhu smoked constantly, and servants moved in and out serving tea and emptying ashtrays. Diem’s brother struck Colby one minute as a man of the Enlightenment—his reasoning precise, rife with Cartesian logic—and the next as a mystic, with every argument and scheme cast in spiritual terms. Nhu expressed his devotion to Diem but confided to Colby that his brother was somewhat naïve. Vietnamese leaders could no longer command respect simply by virtue of the position they held. Nhu observed that the president thought of modernity only in technical, concrete terms—highways, schools, bridges, hospitals—assuming that if these were provided, the people would follow. In this he was mistaken, Nhu said. To Colby’s great satisfaction, Nhu seemed to appreciate the need for a political base, particularly in the countryside.

  Desperately, Colby searched for common ground with the Saigon regime. He sensed that Nhu was the key. During his less frequent meetings with Diem, which also lasted at least four hours, there were no discussions of political models and theories, but rather an endless monologue, in which the president expounded with great enthusiasm and even greater detail on his infrastructure programs. There was his Agroville Program in the delta, where, typically, the population lived dispersed and isolated, scattered along the banks of the endless network of canals. In this project, peasants would be clustered in communities large enough to support schools, hospitals, and proper marketplaces. There were new cash crops to raise the living standards of the peasants; light industries, such as textiles, for the cities; and a national Institute of Administration to train bureaucrats and free the country of the Francophile bureaucrats who then ran it. All fine and good, thought Colby and Nhu, but the people were not a formless mass waiting to be shaped. The government swam in a sea of sects, secret societies, political factions, and ethnic groups that were ambitious, more or less organized, and sometimes armed. And, of course, there were the communists.

  “I sympathized with Nhu’s insistence that Vietnam needed to discover and develop a new political identity around which its people could rally if the competing Communist appeal for change and for nationalism was to be defeated,” Colby later wrote. But what identity? That was the rub. Like the pope, the Ngos wanted to be both loved and obeyed, but if they could not have love, they were certainly going to have obedience. The difference between the pope and the Ngos, who claimed to be acting in his name, was that the former resorted to excommunication to compel conformity, whereas the latter were willing to use imprisonment, torture, and execution. Colby decided that for the time being, that was going to have to do. “The task in South Vietnam required strong leadership,” he wrote, “and Diem’s messianic dedication seemed more appropriate for it than did the confusion and indecision that could come from overly precise application of the American doctrine of the separation of powers.”20 From the very beginning of his tour in Vietnam, Colby faced the quintessential Cold War dilemma. In the war against the forces of international communism, what were acceptable levels of tyranny and corruption? Would his and the Agency’s tolerance exceed that of the American public? In this regard, was it the CIA’s duty to lead or to follow? Should it advise, or merely inform the political powers that were?

  As with any imperial government, there was a court. Chief among the courtesans was Nguyen Dinh Thuan, secretary of state for the presidency, and Tran Kim Tuyen, chief of the Service d’Etudes Politiques et Sociales (SEPES, Bureau of Political and Social Research), the government’s intelligence and security service. Thuan oversaw the vast bureaucracy upon which the Ngo brothers depended to rule. He was also the principal interpreter of the regime to the American mission. Soft-spoken and fluent in English, he listened far more than he talked. US officials like Colby could sound out an idea with Nhu and Diem through Thuan before formally broaching it. Tuyen, who occupied the French governor general’s servants’ quarters, was a tiny man, less than five feet tall and tipping the scales at a hundred pounds. “He projected the quiet and shy air of the Confucian scholar,” Colby wrote, “the long and carefully tended nail on the little finger of his left hand certifying his status,” an affectation left over from the Chinese tradition intended to signify freedom from physical labor. Tuyen’s manner and stature, of course, belied a ruthlessness and cruelty that were the necessary qualifications for his job.21

  In July 1959, less than six months after the Colbys’ arrival in Vietnam, the first American military casualties
occurred when two servicemen died in a communist attack on a MAAG billet outside Bien Hoa. The US Mission was alarmed but did not know what to make of the incident. The level of violence in the countryside was low, and as late as 1958, Hanoi had once again made overtures to the Diem regime about holding nationwide elections. Saigon had rejected that initiative and scheduled parliamentary elections for the south on August 30, 1959. Still, Ho Chi Minh and the Politburo clung to hopes for a political settlement: communist cadres in the south received instructions to have their supporters vote for left-leaning candidates as a step toward influencing political life, at least indirectly. Privy to this information, Nhu and the Can Lao rigged the elections so that the government won 121 out of the 123 contested seats. Not satisfied, the Saigon government indicted the two non–Can Lao candidates on fraud charges and refused to seat them. On August 31, Cambodia’s Prince Sihanouk, whom Saigon viewed as a communist dupe, barely survived an assassination attempt by Nhu’s agents. On Nhu’s orders, two suitcases had been delivered to Sihanouk’s palace, one addressed to the prince and the other to his chief of protocol, Prince Vakrivan. Sihanouk’s was filled with explosives, and Vakrivan’s was not, but, following protocol, the latter opened both suitcases and was blown to bits. A shaken Sihanouk issued a communiqué blaming the Ngo brothers and the CIA. There was no hope of a political solution, Hanoi concluded, and in early 1960 it began work on what would become the Ho Chi Minh Trail.22

  Undeterred by this gathering storm, the Colbys set about exploring their environs. Vietnam, according to a local saying, resembled two rice baskets hanging from the ends of a farmer’s carrying pole. Stretching more than 1,000 miles from north to south, the country was 400 miles across at its widest in the north and less than 35 miles across in the center, the pole between the baskets. The northwest was mountainous, forested, and thinly populated; the northeast, featuring the Red River Delta, was heavily populated and included the twin cities of Hanoi and Hai Phong. Along the western flank of the country, from the northern highlands to just north of Saigon, ran the Annamite Range, the site of the Central Highlands and home to many of the country’s forty-three ethnic minorities. Between the mountains and the sea ran a strip of incredibly fertile, densely populated land that produced, along with the Mekong Delta to the south, much of the nation’s food staple—rice. The southern basket on the pole, with Saigon as its gateway, was the vast Mekong Delta, featuring thousands of miles of mangrove swamps, which had largely been reclaimed and turned into rice paddies. Villages were widely dispersed, running along the canals that provided irrigation and transportation. To the interior toward the Cambodian border lay the dense and mysterious U-Minh Forest.

  Ever restless, Colby got out of Saigon at every opportunity. He traveled to the Central Highlands with a legislative delegation to witness the inauguration of a government-sponsored settlement to accommodate northern immigrants and surplus population from the coastal lowlands. He did not realize at the time that what he was seeing was a phenomenon similar to the displacement of Native Americans by white settlers. He journeyed to the far south of the country to visit one of Diem’s agrovilles in the Ca Mau peninsula. In that province, his hosts told him, there were now some forty elementary and secondary schools, whereas before 1954 there had been but four. In truth, Ca Mau was one of the most insecure regions in South Vietnam; the Agency reported to the State Department in April 1959 that entire districts were under communist control.23

  During his first three-year stint in Vietnam, Colby showed no reluctance in traveling to all parts of South Vietnam with his family. There was a Sunday outing to see the multicolored tile and ceramic Cao Dai cathedral at Tay Ninh. The family journeyed farther south, to the coast, and hired a fishing boat to ferry them to the island of Phu Quoc, a refuge for the leaders of the Tay Son Rebellion of the 1770s and onetime home to Alexandre de Rhodes, the Portuguese missionary who had published the first Portuguese-Latin-Vietnamese dictionary. Colby’s son Carl remembered two things from the trip: a shark larger than the fishing boat, and the incredible smell from the bins of fermenting fish destined to become nuoc mam, the ubiquitous fish sauce of Vietnamese cuisine. Bill remembered “the main roads of the Mekong . . . filled with multicolored, rickety buses hurtling through bucolic villages to teeming market centers.”24 On another outing, Bill and his oldest son, John, took a train north from Saigon to Hue, the old imperial capital situated at the mouth of the Perfume River and home to many of the country’s most influential intellectuals and revolutionaries. From Hue the two traveled by automobile to the Ben Hai River which bisected the Demilitarized Zone separating North Vietnam from South. From this vantage point they could see the North Vietnamese flag flying from a military outpost. It was then on to Khe Sanh by way of Highway 9. All along the route were burned-out French villas and tiny forts and guard towers manned in the past, usually with disastrous results, by the French and their Vietnamese collaborators. The Colby family loved to visit Dalat, the exotic mountain resort town where, at 5,000 feet, Americans, Europeans, and members of the Vietnamese elite could escape the heat and humidity of Saigon and its environs.

  Somehow, Bill found time to head up a Boy Scout troop during his stint in Vietnam, where the Scouts were immensely popular. The upper echelons of the Viet Minh, the military force that had defeated the French in the First Indochinese War, had been filled with former Scouts. Carl remembered on one occasion being flown with the rest of his troop for an outing near Dalat by an air force colonel named Nguyen Cao Ky. Finally, Vietnam was home to some of the most beautiful beaches in the world. Europeans and Americans favored two resorts—Cape St. Jacques, only 60 miles from Saigon, and Nha Trang, an overnight train ride from the capital. During a return trip from one of their weekends at the beach, the Colbys’ train shuttered violently to a stop. Shrouded in darkness, huddled in their compartment, Barbara and the children, including baby Christine, born in Saigon in 1960, waited while Bill went to investigate. It turned out that a squad of communist insurgents had dynamited a rail bridge, taking the locomotive and the first couple of cars down with it. With a single ARVN guard at each end of the surviving string of coaches, the passengers were forced to wait in suspense until dawn brought a relief train from Saigon.25

  As 1959 turned into 1960, Bill Colby became increasingly convinced that the Diem regime, supported by the American mission, was pursuing policies that were not only irrelevant to effective nation-building but counterproductive. The Agroville Program, designed to concentrate scattered peasant settlements into larger communities where the ARVN could provide security, was a case in point. The Vietnamese practiced ancestor worship, which included annual ritual visitations to their gravesites. To induce the rural population to move far from their ancestors’ tombs, the government promised schools, hospitals, and market facilities. But when the uprooted arrived at their new villages, they found that they were expected to build their own homes and community facilities without compensation. Everyone agreed that land reform was essential to pacifying rural Vietnam. A large percentage of the arable land had historically been owned and operated by large absentee landholders who exploited tenants and agricultural laborers unmercifully. Writer Duong Van Mai Elliott, who had lived in Hanoi during the period when the Viet Minh came to power, recalled that the single most important move Ho and his colleagues made was to dispossess French and Vietnamese landlords and distribute their holdings among the peasantry. Diem and Nhu were committed to agrarian reform in name, but when push came to shove, the national government exempted all holdings smaller than 250 acres. Colby recalled that “we went to Diem at one point saying, ‘Well, you know, you’ve really got to cut this down and make it smaller, because there were still landlords.’ He said, ‘You don’t understand. I cannot eliminate my middle class.’”26

  Most important, Colby believed, was the absence of any viable political movement in the countryside. Diem was firmly of the opinion that South Vietnam’s only enemies were colonialism, feudalism, and communism. With the fi
rst two defeated, the sole task remaining was to hold North Vietnam at bay while crushing the insurgency in South Vietnam. The Ministry of Information had created a “mass political organization,” the National Revolutionary Movement, in October 1955; failure to support the party was interpreted as sympathy for the communists. All reform came from the top down. This was true in North Vietnam as well, but there at least some reform was genuine. “The sole political function expected of the citizenry,” Colby later wrote, “was to assemble later in well-ordered lines in the hot sun to greet visiting delegations of foreigners or officials from Saigon, to wave the national flag with its three red stripes on a yellow field, and to cheer ‘Muon Nam!’ (‘A Thousand Years!’) at mention of President Diem’s leadership.”27 There was political dissent in Saigon and Hue, but it consisted primarily of educated and wealthy cliques that resented being shut out of power by the Ngo family and had no connection with the 90 percent of the population living in the countryside. The Cao Dai and Hoa Hao, South Vietnam’s largest religious sects, were thoroughly penetrated by the Can Lao, Nhu’s political apparatus.